Overcoming Life's Challenges: A Personal Memoir of a Cape Town Mayor

By Gordon Oliver

 The author tells his story of being born under the Gemini star sign, living a life defined by an unremitting struggle between the conflicting twins of "Yes, I can" and "No, you can't!" It describes a struggle of early childhood uncertainty, being hidden as a child, of unanswered questions and preferring to be in the background during his childhood through to his middle years. Generally surrendering to the opinions of others, while holding back on his own views, was the hallmark of his being. 
 Hesitating to take on challenges was a familiar pattern, as was the likelihood of yielding to mediocracy, the easy way out. Tilting the balance away from "No you can't" to "Yes, I can … and I will" was the major factor in the author's life towards holding leadership positions in every sphere of his adult public life, from committee secretary early in his professional career to becoming Cape Town's first citizen. From the mayoralty to ministry, standing up for justice and the dignity of life and being able to make a difference was the path he chose; mediocracy simply was not good enough. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Dec 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9798891554153

Gordon Oliver

 Gordon Oliver, born in 1939, lives in Cape Town, South Africa. He holds a master’s degree in Religious Studies from the University of Cape Town. He was ordained in the ministry of the Unitarian Church in Cape Town in 2002 and was elected President of International Council of Unitarians and Universalists from 2003 to 2007. He was chairman of the Cape Town Inter-Faith Initiative and was appointed co-director of the Parliament of the World’s Religions held in Cape Town in 1999. Most of his professional life was in Human Resources Management and during this time, he was an elected councillor on the Cape Town City Council, serving for fifteen years. He was Mayor of Cape Town from 1989 to 1991 and had the privilege of welcoming Nelson Mandela to the Cape Town City Hall on the day he was released from prison .  

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About the Author

Gordon Oliver, born in 1939, lives in Cape Town, South Africa. He holds a master’s degree in Religious Studies from the University of Cape Town. He was ordained in the ministry of the Unitarian Church in Cape Town in 2002 and was elected President of International Council of Unitarians and Universalists from 2003 to 2007. He was chairman of the Cape Town Inter-Faith Initiative and was appointed co-director of the Parliament of the World’s Religions held in Cape Town in 1999. Most of his professional life was in Human Resources Management and during this time, he was an elected councillor on the Cape Town City Council, serving for fifteen years. He was Mayor of Cape Town from 1989 to 1991 and had the privilege of welcoming Nelson Mandela to the Cape Town City Hall on the day he was released from prison.

Dedication

Dedicated to my best friends:

Lizette, my wife; and my daughters, Colleen, Wendy, Fiona and Lynne, who have each been a major source of joy, inspiration and encouragement in my life.

Daily, I give thanks for them.

Copyright Information ©

Gordon Oliver 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

Ordering Information

Quantity sales: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Oliver, Gordon

Overcoming Life’s Challenges

ISBN 9798891554146 (Paperback)

ISBN 9798891554153 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023904729

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

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Foreword

There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight –

Ten to make and the match to win –

A bumping pitch and a blinding light,

An hour to play and the last man in.

And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,

Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,

But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote

Play up! play up! and play the game!

The sand of the desert is sodden red,–

Red with the wreck of a square that broke; –

The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,

And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.

The river of death has brimmed his banks,

And England’s far, and Honour a name,

But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks,

Play up! play up! and play the game!

Sir Henry Newbolt – Vitae Lampada

The year was 1989. Gordon Oliver was the voice that rallied the ranks. Gordon Oliver focused the minds of Cape Town’s city councillors and Capetonians alike on what was right and honourable and correct. Gordon Oliver was the catalyst who demonstrated that change could happen and did.

This quiet, somewhat demure, man’s back-bone suddenly stiffened when his time came.

I had the privilege of having been elected his deputy mayor in September 1989 and as tradition of the time dictated, I would follow as mayor two years thereafter. When that time came, I said, somewhat dauntingly, in my acceptance speech:

What an act to follow – what an incredible mayor, Gordon Oliver has proved to be, but daunted I should never have been. It was an act that broke the mould and clarified the direction I then knew I must take. It had become a relay race to democracy, victory of which was a foregone conclusion only because the opening sprinter had set such a pace.

There were other traditions and time-worn protocols that were thrown out the window with that mayoralty: the mayor’s role was purely ‘ceremonial’; i.e., it was the tradition that the mayor would not and should not attempt policy decision making or – heaven forbid – comment on politics. Yet it was a time of the worst politics in South Africa. It was a time for all committed citizens to stand-up to the scourge of Apartheid. How could Cape Town’s first citizen equivocate?

In fact, when the apartheid government had disenfranchised Cape Town citizens of colour, the council unambiguously moved:

We believe that it is the democratic right of all our people, regardless of race, colour or creed, to participate fully in the city and its city council. We are actively committed to change and to achieving an open society for all.

The time had arrived to be actively committed and this memoir details Mayor Gordon Oliver’s action in carrying out that commitment.

But the first and most relevant question he asks: Who am I. The answer to that searching question takes the reader through his parents’ background; his own upbringing during the war years and schooling thereafter.

He poses religious and interwoven political philosophies as he evolved from a strict Catholic School education to a liberal Unitarian Church theology. What is liberalism and what defines a liberal? Strangely, the word has been used derisively to describe white colonialism of the Apartheid era, which is a deliberate distortion.

Labels are superficial crutches used to simplify a need to examine in depth a person, a policy or a philosophy. How much easier is it to discard a telling argument by labelling the proponent of that argument as, for example ‘a communist.’ McCarthy in the USA was good at using that terminology and the apartheid National Party in South Africa soon latched onto that technique. I remember in the Cape Provincial Council being referred to as: ’n lid van die links-gesinde magsgroep [a member of the left inclined power group]. The person in question never dealt with my carefully prepared denouncement of their policies.

Thus, in answering his own question: Who am I? Gordon concludes that he is a Liberal in both Politics and Religion. The well-known journalist of yesteryear, Anthony Doman, warned that some view a liberal outlook of individualism as being a wishy-washy pretension and idealism when what was needed was firm, practical action toward liberation of one group that was being oppressed by another. Gordon uses Alan Paton’s definition, written in the ’50s. He quotes Leo Marquard’s writings of the same period, where he emphasises the importance of what the lack of liberalism is.

In understanding Gordon, it is important to know that here was a man who not only espoused a deep personal philosophy based on sound principles of the rights of the individual and the high ideal of the worth and dignity of his fellow human being, and in his mayoralty, he practically actioned those beliefs.

In 1979, midwinter, the Divisional Council of the Cape decided to implement the apartheid government policy, by demolishing of a number of squatter shacks in Grassy Park.

The Cape Town suburb of Grassy Park bordered on Plumstead, where both Gordon and I lived. One cold and wet night, the heavens opened. Gordon and I were woken by the storm at 1 a.m. and I phoned him. What are we going to do about it? he said. The next day, a Sunday, my three sons were due to be christened. To celebrate with our extended family, I had purchased kilograms of Morris’s Special Wors. The boerewors was soon prepared in my stove and we rushed to the now homeless, vulnerable people in the cold and wet early morning Cape storm. This spontaneity epitomised Gordon’s character and a trait I observed throughout his career.

What was different about our relationship as mayor and deputy mayor was another game changer for the traditional Cape Town City Council. This mayor and his deputy got along and, in fact, complemented each other throughout Gordon’s two-year term. Historically, it was known that some former mayors and their deputies had very often experienced personality clashes. Our mayoralty was more than a nice fuzzy feeling; it enabled us to plan strategically and to our mutual strengths. What a pleasure it was to work under all the stresses of the office never having to watch one’s back.

We, you and I, my friend, have journeyed through history together. We have seen Cape Town rise up and say "No further" as we marched in September 1989 with our beloved Archbishop Tutu, witnessing and hosting the dawn of Democracy on the day Nelson Mandela was released.

I am reminded of the prayer often said by my then mayoral chaplain, the very Revd. Dean Colin Jones:

Lord, look upon us in this City – keep our pity and our sympathy fresh and our eyes heavenward lest we grow hard.

Alderman Frank van der Velde

Mayor of Cape Town 1991–1993

Prologue

Deena Metzger, the American poet, novelist and storyteller, wrote Stories are origins and origins are places that we walk out from, because stories have many feet and travel several roads at once…because the story conjures the invisible. She also wrote To follow Story is to understand the path of healing. Each of our stories is a universe. Each one of us is living a story. To discover its shape and essence is essential to soul making.

Each of us has a story, a colourful kaleidoscope of many stories of the winding, twisting road of life’s long journey that is constant, changing, always in transition, an ongoing series of stages, phases and dimensions, and many questions. One never reaches a destination; one is never THERE!

The Poet also said, If you don’t know my story, you don’t know me. I’d preface that with the comment that by writing my story I’ve enabled myself to better know and understand myself.

Hence, I present my story for posterity’s sake, principally for my wife and daughters, for each one, in her own way, has contributed very significantly to my path of personal understanding and growth.

Everyone’s stories have much in common with those of others, and each story is unique. The poet, Robert Weston, an American Unitarian Universalist minister, wrote in his poem Seasons of the Soul:

Who are we who come here this day?

Each is a question and many answers;

And many questions with no answers.

Each of us is a hope and a prayer,

Songs of mourning and many songs of joy,

A sense of wonder and a continuing search.

From our questioning may come a growing understanding,

And still more questions.

The answers fail us and the questions multiply.

In our confusions there grow deeper and wiser awarenesses

From which, as stone walls, answers held us back.

Who are we? asks the poet.

Who am I? is the existential question we each ask throughout our lives, and it provides a rich tapestry of answers.

Along the many turns on the winding road of life’s journey, there are for all of us, many questions and doubts, failures and sorrows, achievements and successes. I invite you to witness mine.

Turning the Kaleidoscope

Among the significant features of my childhood and teenage years were three life-shaping experiences. The first was my parents’ experience leading up to and beyond my birth, a story that has been a troubling influence far into my adulthood, and which I shall unfold in this reflection on my life.

The second significant life-shaping experience was a consciousness in my early teens of the race-based political ideology of the newly elected apartheid government in South Africa in the late 1940s and early 1950s. When the apartheid government was about to remove coloured people from the voters’ roll, I listened with considerable concern to the political discussions among the adults in my family, avidly read the newspapers, and started to acquaint myself with political alternatives to apartheid. Over time, it became clear to me that liberal politics presented a moral alternative to the iniquitous political system that was rapidly taking root in the country. Because of the obvious injustice of our country’s institutionalised racist ideology, the seeds of liberalism took root in my consciousness and grew into a life-long voluntary activism in politics.

The third life-shaping experience was my abandonment, at the age of seventeen, of Roman Catholicism in which I’d been raised. At boarding school, my faith had meant the world to me. After leaving school I continued to attend Mass at the local parish church for a while but it became meaningless to me and I dropped out of the church altogether.

These aspects of my early years strongly influenced and motivated my later adult life. I was unaware during my teens and twenties, of how liberal politics would provide a foundation for my interest in liberal religion. In my early fifties, having crisscrossed a changing landscape of different religious experiences over some thirty years, I came across a statement on Unitarianism, a liberal religion, at St Mark’s Unitarian Church in Edinburgh, Scotland, which was one of the most significant descriptions of liberal religion that I had come across.

It described liberal religion (in this case, Unitarianism) as that which is open to change and development in the light of new thought and discovery, recognising that people use words in different ways, so that religious language which is helpful to one person is limiting to another. What unites religious liberals, whatever their personal religion, is a common concern for the quality of life which is revered and celebrated. It went on to say The emphasis is on being true to oneself. One is encouraged to emulate the lives of those who show humankind how to be true to oneself, such as Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Gandhi and countless others, but the relevance of the life and teachings of such individuals is a matter of personal choice. Liberal religion is open to new revelations from whatever source, in contrast to more traditional theologies that require conformity and adherence to a common creed or established teachings or scriptures.

Thus, over the years, I became aware of an underlying synchronous or corresponding connection in my life, a convergence of my religious and political value systems: a recognition that religion and politics overlap to a significant degree, concerning how we relate to each other morally and politically in terms of universal religious principles. I believed that political injustice and racism were scourges, incongruent with a humane and just society and therefore with religion. As a result, South Africa’s change, in 1994, to a politically just system with a modern constitution entrenching a human rights ethos in our country reflected all the very best that had inspired me about liberalism over the years.

Chapter One

War Years and My Parents

1939

In the late 1930s the threat of World War II was intensifying. The world was anxiously watching the goings-on between the governments of Europe. Adolf Hitler’s expansionist goals threatening Poland were on the boil, while Poland, Britain, France, Russia and Italy frantically exchanged communications. War with Germany was imminent.

On 1st September, 1939 German troops swarmed across the Polish border and unleashed the first Blitzkrieg the world had seen. That day Britain and France declared war on Germany: a decision that was to drastically change the face of the human race for all time.

Here, back home, two days later, South Africa, after a narrow and dramatic vote in Parliament, gave its support to Britain, by declaring war on Germany, joining all other Commonwealth countries around the world. This decision was to have major consequences on the national political, social and economic future of our country. It was against this background that I was born.

I was born in Bloemfontein on Thursday, 25th May, just over three months before the commencement of the war. Why I was born in Bloemfontein, was never made clear to me. This question belongs to the first of the three life-shaping experiences in my life that I mentioned earlier.

My parents were born and bred Capetonians. Richard Oliver, born on 14th January, 1900, was my father, and my mother, Alice Helena Dorothea Burroughs, was born on 17th June 1903. My father’s parents, from Dundee, Scotland, had settled in Cape Town in the late 1800s, as had Alice’s parents, who had come from Bristol, England. Alice’s mother, Helena Evason (formerly Burroughs) was a member of the Fry family (of Cadbury-Fry chocolate fame), who were Quakers. Later in life she became Cape Town’s well known and respected spiritualist medium and healer who had a regular following.

My mother, Alice, was the second oldest of eight children, six boys and two girls. I don’t know when and how her parents’ first marriage ended but after her mother’s marriage to John Burroughs ended, she married Joe Evason. I was in boarding school from day one so I have little memory of Joe Evason except that he was a dear and gentle old grandfather to me. He died in 1948 when I was just nine years old, and I still treasure a large Swiss Cyma pocket-watch of his which my grandmother gave me after his death.

I know little of my mother, Alice’s childhood, but one thing stands out in my memory of what she told me. She sometimes spoke